The 5G core is built on the Verizon Cloud Platform
Verizon has officially begun moving customer traffic onto its cloud-native, containerized-design 5G core. Doing so will deliver “unprecedented levels of service agility, flexibility and automated scalability,” said the carrier.
The 5G core is built on the Verizon Cloud Platform (VCP), which is an internally built telco cloud base on a Webscale software architecture that the carrier runs in its data centers. The VCP, said Verizon, will enable support for 5G standalone, 4G/5G Non-Standalone and Voice over New Radio (VoNR) services.
“We are working to ensure customers not only have access to 5G, but have the most advanced, secure, and robust network to support the remarkable new solutions being developed on 5G technology,” commented Adam Koeppe, SVP of network technology, strategy and planning at Verizon in a statement.
The cloud-native, virtualized design of the 5G Standalone network will allow Verizon to offer network slicing services, automatically scale up or scale down network capacity for different use cases and manage radio access network functions in real-time, the operator said.
“Bringing traffic onto the newly designed core coincides with the ecosystem development around us,” said Koeppe. “With a critical number of customers now having devices that can access the advanced features of the 5G core and the solutions and applications development – especially for enterprise customers – really taking off, now is the ideal time to move traffic onto the new core.”
AT&T’s VP of Mobility & Access Architecture Gordon Mansfield told Fierce Wireless in May that it is waiting for the SA device ecosystem to advance before activating its 5G SA core, a move it has yet to make.
Verizon had similar device-related concerns; however, in an April conversation with RCR Wireless News, the carrier’s SVP and Chief Engineer Lynn Cox implied that simply activating its 5G core would provide the “fuel” needed for the ecosystem to erupt. “As we start to deploy the standalone 5G core … we will add new services on top of the network that will continue to fuel the 5G economy. We’re actively seeding the market with 5G Standalone-capable devices and SIM cards,” she said.
